The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1)

by Andrew Turpin

  “Hmm, but the business is losing money. You said so yourself. I’m going to be away for the next few days, just taking a break. I’ll think about it. I do have some contacts in London who might help. I’ll speak with them and let you know.”

  Ignacio and his father carried on eating in silence. There seemed little else to talk about. An image of Lucia on the futon flashed through his mind.

  So what should he do? Halt the crazy gold-purchasing arrangements his father had in place? Yes. Work out where the gold was coming from? Yes. Was it legal? Could he take advantage if not? Questions, questions.

  Ignacio knew the old man was right about some things, even if he hated him.

  If this guy Joe Johnson was threatening to destroy his old man’s reputation in the short term, that could finally sink the already struggling business. Not what Ignacio wanted right now.

  As they stood up to leave the restaurant, Ignacio had a thought and turned toward his father. “Before we go, one other question. This gold supplier, what’s their story? Do they buy the gold they sell to us from a private source? Or off the market? Where do they get it from?”

  José averted his gaze before replying. “I’m not sure. Perhaps you can find that out, too.”

  Ignacio looked down at his feet and sighed. Getting a straight answer from his father had always been too much to hope for.

  The waitress brought their coats. Ignacio briefly thought about helping the old man with his, but then left him to it.

  Ignacio arrived back at Barrio 31 earlier than he expected. But he found he couldn’t get into his shack immediately because police were breaking up a mass gang fight in the road outside, so he waited some distance down the road until it was cleared.

  Once inside, he sat down on the wooden chair in his bedroom and relit the remains of the joint that Lucia had been smoking earlier in the day. She had gone off to work at a nearby bar.

  The trip to London had taken on another dimension. What to do?

  He checked his watch. It was now quarter to eleven. He shrugged, then dialed a number on his phone. It rang for about twenty seconds before Diego answered.

  “Hello, Diego, just calling to update you, amigo. I’m taking a flight tomorrow night. I’ll be there on Thursday.”

  There was silence at the other end.

  “It’s the middle of the night here,” Diego said eventually. “I was asleep. Look, forget it. We’re making progress. We’ve pulled a guy in who works for the car-parts company.”

  Ignacio took a deep drag from the joint and rolled his head from side to side. “Go on.”

  “We caught him after work in a bar. Bought him a few beers, got him hammered, and offered him a lift home. We’ve had him here for three days.”

  “Three days? You’re joking?” Ignacio put his hand to his forehead. “I told you, there’s no rush. The police will be all over it.”

  “Nah, it’s fine. They’ll never find us here, and he doesn’t know where he is.”

  Ignacio shook his head. He took another long drag from his joint. “So what has he told you, exactly?”

  “Not much yet, but we’re working on it. Hopefully by tomorrow.”

  “Okay, but go easy. It’s London, remember, not Lima. Any luck with the weapons?”

  “No, not yet. I’ll tell you when we do.” There was a loud beep on the line, followed by a silence and a couple more beeps.

  “Diego, you still there?” Ignacio said. “Hello? Hello? There’s one really crucial thing I need to . . . ” But Diego was gone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tuesday, November 22, 2011

  London

  Johnson paced up and down his room at London’s Tower Hotel, kicking the carpet as he went. Jacob seemed to have vanished off the planet.

  After a lot of digging, he’d managed to turn up traces of the man—up to a point. Johnson found clear references on various databases to a Jacob Kudrow in the United Kingdom from 1948 to 1971 at three different addresses.

  In fact, there were either census or electoral roll records for all of those years. It was definitely him, because there was only one Jacob Kudrow, and there was a Daniel Kudrow listed at the same address in Whitechapel, East London, in 1948 and 1952. Perhaps that was when Daniel moved to the United States.

  The last address, from 1966 onward, was in Hay’s Mews, Mayfair.

  “Hmm, Mayfair. Must have been doing all right for himself by 1966 to buy that,” Johnson said to himself. He made a note of the address listed.

  But after 1971? Nothing.

  He must have moved. But where to?

  Marriage records? Nothing.

  What if Jacob had changed his name? And if so, why would he belatedly do that in 1971?

  Johnson walked over to his laptop on the table and closed it. Then he called room service and ordered a double espresso. The lack of sleep on the overnight flight had left him feeling somewhat foggy, and he needed something stronger than what the capsule coffee machine on the table was going to give him.

  Room 532 at the Tower Hotel was a typically smart but bland four-star room in a bland four-star hotel. A businessman’s hotel. Neat, symmetrical, modern. Johnson sighed. At least the place was near Jayne’s flat.

  But if he didn’t have a five-star place to stay, at least he had a fifth-floor, five-star view overlooking the River Thames and Tower Bridge.

  When Johnson had landed at Heathrow Airport earlier that morning, he had been greeted by the sun shining from a sky punctuated with only a few fluffy white clouds.

  Now a dense bank of dark gray clouds was rapidly covering the capital from the east. The wind was increasing in velocity by the minute, and a few snowflakes were starting to whistle past the hotel window.

  There was a knock at the door. Room service had wasted no time in bringing up the coffee.

  Johnson settled at the table next to the window and drank it, then sat thinking and scribbling occasionally in his notebook.

  He picked up the complimentary copy of The Daily Telegraph that had been left on the table. The main headlines were all about President Obama’s imminent visit to the U.K. to see Prime Minister David Cameron, the Queen, and a string of other key people. That will be a real circus, Johnson thought.

  Then he pulled on his coat and took a few ten- and twenty-pound bills out of his bag and stuffed them into his wallet, removing the dollar bills. He also put his main cell phone and a spare phone in his pocket. The second one was for use with pay-as-you-go SIM cards, for security purposes as needed.

  As an afterthought, he also took a scarf and a dark gray wool hat from his suitcase.

  By then, the combination of caffeine and a new feeling of intent had left him somewhat perkier. He headed out the door.

  Buenos Aires

  Ignacio was in his neighbor’s house in Barrio 31, negotiating a protection deal for his own property for the period he expected to be in London, when his phone rang.

  “Hey, jefe, it’s Diego. Some good news. My old Argentine army buddy, who lives south of London, has come up with the goods. He brought in three Browning HPs for us. A good piece of kit. They’ll do the job.”

  “Okay, at least something’s going right—more than it is here. I’m just trying to make some arrangements to stop my house from being firebombed while I’m away. It’s not going well. Also, we’ve got another problem. I was about to tell you last night, but then we damn well got cut off. The thing is, there’s somebody else on the chase—actually, two people.”

  Ignacio went on to tell Diego about his conversation with his father and the potential threat that Joe Johnson posed to their plans.

  “This guy Johnson’s gone to London already. He’s staying at the Tower Hotel, near Tower Bridge. I got his number from his website, phoned, and pretended to be a possible client. His daughter told me where he was. Easy, very easy. He also has this woman journalist he’s working with, a Fiona Heppenstall. I don’t know whether she’s in the U.K. or not. But I’m going to e-mail you photos of th
em. It’s Johnson we need to target, mainly.”

  Ignacio took a breath. “We need to give him an opening shot, a warning, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll up the ante. Now here’s what I want you to do.”

  He spent several minutes reeling off a series of instructions before ending the call.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tuesday, November 22, 2011

  London

  By the time Johnson had completed the ten-minute walk to Tower Hill underground station, followed by a short train ride to Blackfriars, the unseasonably early snow had become heavier. As he emerged into the open air again, the wind was whipping it into flurries around his ankles.

  He walked across the road, down Tudor Street, and through an ancient archway into the legal quarter—the Inns of Court—marked by a mixture of quaint brick and stone buildings, small courtyards, arches, and gardens.

  Not far to go now. He knew it was a slightly circuitous route to his destination, but he liked this particular area of London.

  Johnson passed Temple Church on his right and finally emerged at The Strand, a busy artery packed with buses, taxis, and cars, running parallel to the Thames. Snow formed a coating across his shoulders and the top of his hat.

  His destination lay right in front of him across the zebra crossing: the tall Gothic stone arches and edifices of the Royal Courts of Justice.

  Johnson went through the old lobby area, with its battered, characterful wooden swing doors, and joined a short line to put his coat, jacket, and small backpack through the security machine.

  He felt dwarfed inside the cavernous Great Hall, which formed the main common area of the courts, with its decorative patterned stone floor and high vaulted windows.

  It was full of people sheltering from the weather, shivering like him as they brushed snow off their bags and coats.

  After checking at the information desk, Johnson made his way up a tangle of old stone staircases and through dark corridors that smelled of cleaning fluid and floor polish to Room E15.

  A red-haired lady with black-rimmed glasses sat behind a plastic screen. Behind her were dusty bookshelves, a cluster of desks piled high with papers and books, and computers.

  Johnson approached the woman and stood before her. She clearly wasn’t going to acknowledge him.

  He coughed. “Excuse me, I’m trying to find a record of someone’s change of name by deed poll, probably in the 1970s.”

  The woman finally peered over her glasses at him. “Sorry, can’t help. We only keep records for the past five years here, and you can’t view those; they’re confidential. The summary of any name changes is published in The London Gazette, You can see them there. We don’t have them.”

  She shifted back to her computer screen, so abrupt in manner that Johnson, disconcerted, turned and made for the doorway.

  As he did, he heard her voice again behind him. “If it’s an old record, 1970s, you need the National Archives at Kew, down in Richmond. Take the District Line to Kew Gardens. They’ll help you look. They have the detail that goes into the London Gazette. But you’re likely to be wasting your time.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, only about 5 percent of those who change their names have the details enrolled. It’s not required. Good luck.” She turned away once more.

  Johnson ambled back to the Great Hall. He felt very tired again.

  He realized he hadn’t let his sister or children know he had arrived safely in London. He sat down on one of the red padded stone benches lining either side of the imposing hall and took out his cell phone.

  His daughter answered.

  “Hi, Carrie, it’s Dad. I’m safely in London now, so I thought I’d call and let you all know. Why haven’t you gone to school yet?”

  “I wasn’t feeling well this morning, so Aunt Amy said I should stay home. I’ll be okay.”

  “All right. Make sure you have some soup for lunch if you’re not feeling well, okay? Just in case,” Johnson said.

  “Yeah, I’ve already told Aunt Amy that’s what I’d like. So relax, Dad. Oh, and by the way, someone called for you here last night, after you’d gone. He said he might have some work for you. I told him you’d gone to London so you might not be easy to contact, but he said he was also going there and wanted to know which hotel you were staying at. I gave him the details and also your e-mail address and phone number. Is that all right? It was a foreign-sounding guy. He had a Spanish accent.”

  Johnson snapped upright. “A Spanish accent? Are you sure? Did he leave his name?”

  “Yes, definitely Spanish, the same as my teacher at school. He didn’t give his name. I did ask, but he refused to give it. He just said he would contact you.”

  “Can you check the number he called from? It should be on the phone.”

  There was a pause as his daughter checked. “Yep, it’s international—54 11 5843 1119.” Johnson wrote it down.

  Fifty-four was the international code for Argentina, Johnson knew. So who could the caller have been?

  “Dad, Dad? Are you listening? Earth calling . . . I’m talking to you . . .”

  Johnson could hear Cocoa barking somewhere in the background, but he was too preoccupied to ask whether the poor dog was getting enough exercise in his master’s absence.

  “Sorry, darling. Listen, I’ve got to go. Remember what I’ve told you before. If people call asking where I am, it’s best just to take their number and tell them I’ll call them back. Then send me the number. Don’t tell them where I am, okay?”

  “Okay, Dad. Sorry, I knew that. I just forgot.”

  “It’s okay. And tell Amy and Peter I called, and I hope you feel better soon. I’ll call again tomorrow. Bye then, Carrie. I love you.”

  “Love you too, Dad.”

  He ended the call.

  As he did, he remembered that today would have been his wife Kathy’s fifty-third birthday, had she still been alive. He sat and stared up at the high dusty vaulted windows.

  They had met at Boston University, where Kathy had majored in English Literature, and Johnson, two months her senior, had majored in history. But they had only gotten together in their thirties when both ended up working in Washington, D.C.—Johnson with the OSI and Kathy as an editor for a large magazine publisher.

  He quickly had a conviction that she was his soul mate and they were married on July 16, 1994. So to lose her in October 2005, at the age of forty-six, when Carrie was just nine and Peter only seven, had knocked him off his feet.

  Johnson stood. He couldn’t dwell on all that because he knew if he did, the complex cocktail of chemicals inside him that governed his mood and state of mind, would quickly turn his world black, making it difficult, sometimes impossible, to focus on the task at hand, as it had done in the couple of years following Kathy’s death.

  He needed to get moving and concentrate on something different, something more positive.

  Exiting the National Archives at Kew, Johnson shook his head. After hours of searching through several large bound books containing a myriad of different deeds covering 1971 to 1980, he had found nothing.

  He wandered into a small shop nearby to buy a chocolate bar and three pay-as-you-go SIM cards for his second cell phone. He handed them to the man behind the counter; then as he sometimes did when feeling stressed, he had a sudden urge.

  “Anything else?” the shopkeeper asked.

  “Uh, yes, twenty Marlboro Reds please, and a lighter.”

  The National Archives had seemed like a last throw of the dice to Johnson. He unwrapped the pack of cigarettes, lit one, and wandered down the road. He felt as though he badly needed a smoke.

  What next? He was starting to feel more like a genealogist than a war crimes investigator.

  On the underground train returning to Tower Hill he thought of his conversations with Nathaniel and Fiona. Was there anything else either of them had said that might help?

  He was well aware he hadn’t yet downloaded the MP3 voice file Fiona had se
nt him of her conversation with Nathaniel in the Washington bar. That might contain some useful material.

  Johnson jumped off the underground at the next stop, South Kensington, and found a coffee shop outside the station entrance.

  After ordering a latte and pastry, he slotted the first of the SIM cards into his spare cell phone.

  Then he logged his main phone on to the shop’s Wi-Fi, plugged in his earphones, and downloaded the file from Fiona’s e-mail. He began to listen.

  “We’re off the record again, right?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  Johnson recognized Nathaniel and Fiona’s voices immediately. Nathaniel continued.

  “Okay, good. There are a few things I didn’t mention earlier today. It’s regarding the source of much of the funding for David’s campaign. I believe it’s coming from less than straightforward sources and could even be illegal. You’ll probably say I’m not close to the business, and that’s true. But I’ve been to London recently to visit my uncle, and I discovered a few things that I probably wasn’t meant to.”

  “Forgive me for being a little cynical, Nathaniel, but why are you telling me this? It’s family, right?”

  “Correct. But they don’t see it that way. I’m not one of them, those high achievers, movers and shakers. I get marginalized, not favored. David’s different; he gets the treatment. An easy life. You go and work it out. Follow the money trail—where it comes from and where it goes—and you’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “Sorry, you’re talking in riddles. The money trail—what do you mean?”

  “I mean the Nazi connection.”

  “Come on, what’s this all about? I think it’s time for a bit of straight talking . . . Is it Nazi money, then?”

  “Nazi money? You could say it’s something like that. You’re a top journalist. As I said, you’ll work it out. I’ve got to go. Said too much already.”

  There was silence for a few seconds, then Nathaniel continued.